Yahoo Lifestyle The Truth About Black Responsibility In Hollywood
In the last few moments of “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” director Ahmir Thompson, aka Questlove, shows his audience a montage of great Black artists who’ve publicly crashed and burned under the heavy gaze of Black expectation in a white Hollywood. We see images of Prince, Nina Simone, Whitney Houston, Lauryn Hill and Donna Summer. We see Will Smith accepting his Academy Award in 2022 after slapping Chris Rock earlier in the ceremony.
Those photos follow a nearly two-hour examination of the life and meteoric rise of Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart), front man of the groundbreakingly diverse rock and roll band Sly and the Family Stone. Throughout the documentary, Questlove poses the same question again and again: Could Stewart’s substance misuse and troubled later years have been brought on by external pressures he felt to represent the Black community in a certain way, and to fulfill a need to be palatable to a white audience?
From what the director shows in “Sly Lives,” which had its world premiere at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and heads to Hulu on Feb. 13, that’s debatable.
Culling an extensive array of interview footage and live performances featuring Stewart, Questlove gives the audience a candid look at what the performer thought of himself at the height of his career — and rarely is there any evidence of self-doubt or frustration. Rather, we mostly see a figure who is assured, astoundingly talented and able to offer a smooth retort to a journalist or anyone else who suggests otherwise.
In his own words in “Sly Lives,” Stewart, now 81, recalls when members of the Black Panthers asked if he would be willing to support them and donate to their cause. “They were trying to make me feel like I needed them to remind me I’m Black,” he says. “And I said, ‘I ain’t got no problem being Black in the first place.’”
You could speculate that this bravado might have been a cover. Or perhaps Questlove wanted to have a broader conversation about the nuanced effects of fame on Black figures, using Stewart’s story as a gateway to talk about it. But that makes Stewart’s parts of the documentary, though informative, less effective as a story — and the question the film raises throughout it far more interesting, even though it is a subset of the subject and treated as such.
Still, the filmmaker deserves props for actually attempting a celebrity documentary that feels more authentic than the one-dimensional tributes we usually see these days — and lately at the very same festival.
Questlove grounds “Sly Lives!” with interviews with figures like André 3000, Chaka Khan, D’Angelo and George Clinton, discussing Stewart’s influence in helping to desegregate and decategorize music and probing how that responsibility could have taken a toll on him. But their responses feel more projective and personal than they are relevant to Stewart specifically. While the various artists help assemble a humanistic picture of the great yet tragically flawed musician, they also bring to mind their own struggles to fit inside that impossible space: entertaining but socially conscious, Black but not too Black.
“Some people want to put you on a pedestal like you are the spokesperson for all Black people,” D’Angelo says in the film. “It’s enough just navigating and coping through the change in your life that happens when you become a celebrity. Just that, in itself, is a huge paradigm shift.”
Khan also appeared in the 2022 Epix docuseries “Women Who Rock,” and discussed how she didn’t enjoy being classified as any one type of musician, even though she understood that she was Black and was often categorized as funk or R&B. Celebrating the widely diverse canon of her favorite artists throughout the series, the singer, commonly hailed as “the Queen of Funk,” has also been forthright about her own experience with substance misuse.
Whether that was due in part to any burden Khan might have felt as a Black artist ― particularly coming up in the ’70s, around the same era as Sly and the Family Stone and the civil rights movement ― wasn’t always clear before her appearance in “Sly Lives!” But there’s something to be said about how the media has scrutinized her at her lowest moments throughout the decades.
“When are we ever going to be allowed to be vulnerable, to be human?” Khan asks in “Sly Lives!”
That same question could certainly apply to people like Smith. While his image only appears for a brief instance in “Sly Lives,” it recalls the awkward discourse in the aftermath of his Oscar win. On one end, many exalted him for what they saw as him standing up for wife Jada Pinkett Smith, who was among the celebrities on the receiving end of Rock’s roast that night. Meanwhile, others considered Smith a violent offender who deserved punishment. Few people attempted to engage with Smith’s own struggles with mental health and external pressures he faced, not only as a Black man but as a widely embraced Black entertainer in Hollywood.
But there’s rarely much room in national discourse for nuance or complexity, and certainly not for Black vulnerability. Seeing Hill’s image in that montage is another reminder of that. Nary a year goes by that someone doesn’t evoke her 2001 “MTV Unplugged” performance, where she broke down in tears. The people who bring this up do it with a certain discomfort, as if to suggest that all they really want from Hill is another powerful, epic album like “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” And no humanity.
That desire from fans is understandable. But even Hill has suggested in the past that it can be debilitating for an artist.
That’s especially true for Black performers. “Sly Lives!” remembers that when Sly and the Family Stone’s later albums came out in the ’70s and early ’80s, reviews were critical of the group’s songs engaging with the movements happening in the Black community. Still, whether Stewart’s addictions resulted from that type of reception isn’t entirely clear. What the documentary accomplishes is a portrayal of Stewart as an artist who could easily contend with that kind of judgment.
But that was a different era, when Black vulnerability and Black artistic diversity were barely concepts at all, much less ones you discussed out loud. Even today, exacerbated by dehumanizing standom, these ideas could be met with a certain level of reluctance or obtuseness. And in “Sly Lives,” that’s what makes people’s reflections about their own experiences far more interesting than the portrait of Stewart — and makes them fit more squarely into Questlove’s thesis. The people interviewed in the film are grappling with what it means to be free as it seemed like Stewart was, particularly as artists who are also Black.
Take André 3000 of Outkast, whose 2023 album “New Blue Sun” ― a Grammy-nominated collection of instrumental flute compositions ― provoked a host of commentary, from the uninformed to the derogatory, because it wasn’t the hip-hop album people expected of him.
“I laugh at it because my homies in Atlanta, we’ll talk and they’ll be like, man, you know n***** think you crazy to f*** around with this flute,” André told NPR.
As much as consumers advocate for mental health and talk about Black art not being a monolith, there’s often a strange reaction to a Black artist who fails to satisfy the image we have of him — and that artist’s potential to self-sabotage.
Watching “Sly Lives,” it’s hard not to think about D’Angelo’s own experience with these realities as he discusses how they might have pertained to Stewart. In 2005, amid D’Angelo’s popularity and mounting heartthrob status, he was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace, possession of marijuana, carrying a concealed weapon, and driving while under the influence and without a license.
Questlove has obviously been thinking about his supposition for “Sly Lives!” for a while, because in 2008 he and others in the game were interviewed for a Spin magazine article that reflected on that relationship between Blackness and fame. The headline was “D’Angelo: What the Hell Happened?”
The piece recalled how D’Angelo felt about his music taking a backseat to his physical attractiveness during live performances. “He’d get angry and start breaking shit,” Questlove told Spin. “The audience thinking, ‘Fuck your art, I wanna see your ass!’ made him angry.”
In Questlove’s documentary, D’Angelo, born Michael Archer, is honest about struggling with his vulnerability as a Black celebrity.
“If you don’t know how to handle it, if you don’t have your soul centered and people around you that you really trust and people who really know you and is really down for you,” he says, “it can be unbearable, man. It can turn you into an unwilling participant. And that’s equivalent to hell.”
“Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius)” most compellingly posits that Stewart’s downfall was due to his substance problems, which led to his alienation from his bandmates and his almost total withdrawal from music. But through other artists’ testimonies featured in the documentary, audiences get a richer understanding of the idea of Black genius, which, yes, can come with a sense of burden that doesn’t always feel healthy or productive. And it can hinder, or outright destroy, Black creativity.
“A lot of factors have played into stalling the left-of-center Black movement,” Questlove told Spin in 2008.
Seventeen years later, the public’s relationship with Black celebrity and Black art hasn’t changed very much. But with “Sly Lives,” Questlove is inviting more people to wrestle with its complexities. That’s a start.
